







A Block-Them-All Tool for Bluesky
Also blocks all users who like feeds created by the specified user.
Meta will use your activity on other websites to personalize your feeds
You’ll still be able to opt out.

Custom Feeds Are Not Communities — A Design Theory of Feeds and Commons - Nightflight
Beginning I learned something from Hamakaze no Ryodan, who has deep expertise in creating Bluesky custom feeds. Feeds collect posts without the poster's co…
Middleware for Feed Recommendation in Practice: How Feed Creators Build, Maintain, and Sustain Custom Feeds on Bluesky
Scholars have long proposed third-party middleware as an alternative to centralized algorithmic feeds: feeds built and distributed by independent feed creators. This vision saw no large-scale instantiation until Bluesky, a decentralized microblogging platform, introduced custom feeds in 2023. Although central to the middleware ecosystem, we know little about how feed creators understand their role, build feeds, and sustain them. Through interviews with n = 26 feed creators and third-party developers of feed-building tools, and analysis of n = 88,302 custom feeds, we identify two creator orientations---utility-providing and community-building. Additionally, creators struggle to maintain feeds that fully realize middleware ideals: they lack granular interaction data, receive little feedback, and lack technical expertise to act on either. Finally, creators sustain their feeds as unpaid hobbyists with little platform support and are divided on whether to monetize beyond covering costs. We conclude with design and policy implications for strengthening the middleware feed ecosystem.

Feeds are Not Fit for Gardening — Sympolymathesy, by Chris Krycho
—at least, in their current instantiations with RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, etc.
The Feed is the Product: Why We Stay in Walled Gardens, and Why We Might Finally Leave for the Open Social Web - Zsolt's pckt blog
We have known this for years. We have known that the major platforms are bad for our attention, our sleep, our politics, our children, and our sense of reality....

Zero-Cost Custom Feeds on Bluesky
A simple stack for generating custom feeds for Bluesky programmatically without a backend server
A new paper examines blocking on Bluesky: "…blocking does not decrease the popularity and activity of the blocked users and has a limited effect on the social graph." There is a lot more nuance in here. h/t @index.internet.exchangepoint.tech.ap.brid.gy openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/36822/
City Research Online - Open or Blocked Skies? Community Moderation Practices in Bluesky
openaccess.city.ac.ukCustom feeds are the singular theory of action for growing the open social web and reorienting distribution and monetization in the attention economy. I don't have all the answers, but the future of social is becoming clearer everyday. jshaked.leaflet.pub/3mhqtyaufyc26
Exploring the Frontier of Feeds - The Open Garden
jshaked.leaflet.pubA new paper examines blocking on Bluesky: "…blocking does not decrease the popularity and activity of the blocked users and has a limited effect on the social graph." There is a lot more nuance in here. h/t @index.internet.exchangepoint.tech.ap.brid.gy openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/36822/
City Research Online - Open or Blocked Skies? Community Moderation Practices in Bluesky
openaccess.city.ac.uk@toni.bsky.team @alexbenzer.com i think yall need to wrestle with the fact that the app’s most distinctive feature (“custom feeds”) is something only (relative) nerds use and benefit from. normal people won’t swipe between many algorithms or whatever. have a look at past designs for “communities”
Graze always works better together! Someone builds a filter once, publishes it, and anyone can drop it into a feed - that's what we call custom nodes. Now, they keep themselves current! Turn on Auto-Update to take every safe release, hold on the ones that need attention, and build with ease!
For our first launch of the year, we're kicking off with more blocking features! Rolling out today: ATProto across Bluesky, Blacksky, and any other PDS can apply domain blocklists to Bridgy Fed. Blocks come with if you Bounce, and we even added a handy list of reputable blocklists to choose from.
Launch: Domain Blocklists
blog.anew.socialCustom feeds are not communities. But they can become commons.
Custom Feeds Are Not Communities — A Design Theory of Feeds and Commons
plurality.leaflet.pub